 Hey everybody, today we are debating whether or not there is good evidence for God's existence and we're starting right now. Ladies and gentlemen, thrilled to have you here for another epic debate, as we are so excited for this one, folks. It is going to be a great time. Thanks for being with us. And if it's your first time here, consider hitting that subscribe button as you've got a lot more debates coming up and we are very excited, folks. We wanna let you know we have two seasoned speakers here tonight and they're both linked in the description. So if you're listening and you're like, hmm, I like that, well, great. You can find their links that I've put down in that little description box just down there so you can hear more of both of these gentlemen. And also, folks, wanna let you know we are a neutral channel. So we have no position. We are basically just saying, hey, we wanna give people a chance to talk no matter where they're coming from and so we wanna let you know whether you be Christian, atheist, Republican, Democrat, you know, no matter where you're coming from, we hope you feel welcome here. And with that, let me just give you the quick format for today and then we'll get the ball rolling quick here. So we are going to have 15 minute opening statements, just letting each speaker kinda make their general case or position and then we're gonna have 60 minutes of open conversation followed by about 40 minutes of Q and A. So if you happen to have a question during the discussion or during the speeches or during the Q and A, feel free to shoot your question into the live chat. Just tag me with an at modern day debate that'll make it easier for me to not miss it. And also if you want, you have the option of super chat that pushes your question to the top of the list and it also allows you to make a comment toward one of the speakers that they would of course get to respond to. With that, we of course ask that you'd be your usual friendly selves in all of your questions or super chats toward the speakers as we really do appreciate them being with us today and just getting to listen to them can have a change idea. So with that, given that Tyler will be taking the affirmative today, Tyler will be getting the ball rolling and I am setting the timer. But first let me just say thank you both, Matt and Tyler for being here. It's a pleasure to have you. Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here. Absolutely, so I have the timer set Tyler and the floor is all yours. Thanks again for being here. Thank you for having me. So today I'm gonna take the question of the debate in its broadest sense, one that I hope Matt would actually agree with. And that is whether or not there is any good reason to believe in God. To begin with, I will answer this question as to why I think belief in God is reasonable. That is why there is good evidence to believe that we live in a God full rather than a God less cosmos. I will then respond to common atheistic objection to this position from commonly held epistemic standards. Also, as a matter of preface, let me start by saying that I'm not attempting to appease the logical positivists and the empiricists in the audience. This is because those who think that we should try and only accept and believe what can be empirically or scientifically verified are not only accepting and believing a standard that cannot itself be empirically verified and thus inherently contradict their own stated evidentiary standard, but also they make a simple category error in their demand for exclusively empirical evidence for what would be, if true, a non-natural fact. So let me first state that I simply reject the demand for me to play on their epistemological field with their specific evidentiary constraints, much to their chagrin, I'm sure. Now, to my positive case for God, let me lay out a syllogistic argument that will be the framework for my statements here. I take it that the argument is demonstrably valid, so it will be the truth of the fact or the value premise with which Matt will want to challenge, I'm sure. The argument is as follows. Number one, if God did not exist, then no transcendental facts of reality could be coherently affirmed. Number two, we can coherently affirm transcendental facts of reality, therefore, number three, God exists. Now, this might be too deductive for Matt, and since I'm not here really pushing for a kind of Cartesian or absolute certainty, let me attempt to make a much more modest, abductive version of the argument. And that's merely that if we can coherently affirm transcendental facts of reality, then it is most plausibly because God exists. A transcendental fact, not to be confused with transcendent, are facts that are preconditions for rationality. That is, in order for people to be reasonable, to use reason or to reason about things, these facts have to exist and be true for that to be the case. Some examples would be the laws of logic, a disambiguation between the one and the many, the reality of the external world, the effectiveness of mathematics, the reality of the past, and so on. Now, we all agree on the fact that we can reason. That's a functional common ground that we all share. If Matt and I didn't believe that, we wouldn't be here and you all probably didn't come to see two men just sit here and emote at each other. The question is not if we have this common ground, but on what basis this common ground could exist in reality. The answer is transcendental facts. And these transcendentals that ground our ability to reason, abductively entail certain other facts about what kind of explanations that they themselves might have. Let me use the laws of logic as an example of abduction from a transcendental fact. The laws of logic have the qualities of being transcendent, objective, timeless, spaceless, immaterial, and abstract principles of true thought. To deny any one of those attributes is to effectively throw logic in any process or method built on them like science out the window. Why? Well, imagine that I said logic wasn't necessarily spaceless. This would entail that logic may only apply in specific locations in space. A person may then arbitrarily say the law of conon contradiction is true on earth, but not in orbit around Alpha Centauri. Not only would we want that person to justify such a radical claim, ironically by employing logic itself, but it would make the use of logic variant and viable. So imagine that some atheist named Joe believes that the concept of God entails a logical contradiction. Well, if logic were viable like this, it would mean that belief in God would be irrational on earth, but potentially not irrational in orbit around Alpha Centauri. The same goes for the other attributes. Just consider for yourself what it would mean for the law of identity to be material. Or what about time bound? Could a contradiction be irrational today but rational tomorrow? What about if the laws of logic are objective or conventional? This is a big one. Well, if there's something that we as humans invented merely to help describe the world, this would mean that they aren't true, that they'd just be useful fictions, sure, but still fictions. The implications of this are horrendous. Think of our atheist friend Joe who thinks the concept of God violates a logical convention and therefore shouldn't be believed. Well, imagine some group of theists came to agree with Joe that the God concept entailed the contradiction. So just invented a new convention that overcame Joe's objection or just scrapped the laws applying to God in the first place. Why ought the group of theists be subject to the man-made convention over another? They wouldn't, but Joe would expect almost certainly that they would be rationally blameworthy for that. That is, he would expect that the standard be applied not as a convention, but as an objective standard that they must subject themselves to in order to be rational. Joe wouldn't think himself a conceptual imperialist imposing one possible convention on others. Joe would consider this to be the way the world really is. More so, the way the world really, really is. And I think Joe is right. Moreover, the laws of logic are transcendent and here I do mean transcendent, not transcendental, that they exist outside of the bounds of the natural cosmos, be it the universe or the multiverse, or however you define it. Why do I think this? Because if they were a feature wholly within the cosmos, then the cosmos itself would not be subject to them. This would mean that it could be the case then that the cosmos exists and doesn't exist at the same time and in the same way. Now unless one wants to commit themselves to affirming the possibility of contradictions like that, it seems necessary that the laws of logic be transcendent. So what then do we have? A transcendent realm of objective, absolute, timeless, spaceless, immaterial, abstract principles of true thought. Remember, the laws of logic are rational principles. They're not laws of nature like gravity or motion. They are principles which ground, frame, guide, and correct thinking by a proper inference. When we ask then what the possible basis for them could be, we categorically have only one real feasible option. A transcendent, objective, absolute, spaceless, timeless, immaterial, omnirational, personal mind. Why do I say this? Well, let me get some help from atheistic philosopher Thomas Nagel who wrote an interesting book some years ago called Mind in Cosmos, where he argued that the epistemological program of naturalism has failed and failed miserably. And so Nagel proposed a new kind of way to understand the world, a kind of non-theistic neoplatonism. His argument is basically, well, we have all these fundamental transcendental facts of reality like logic, intentionality, persons, minds, et cetera, which naturalism fails to account for, and theism can account for them, but we can't let theism be true. So maybe it's this neoplatonic realm of abstractions. Nagel just arbitrarily doesn't allow the theistic explanation, but just as a matter of incredulity and not for any fact of consistency or coherence or evidence just because. So he eliminates categorically all naturalistic accounts. He admits theism can account for these features of reality simply, but won't allow it. And so the only category left is a kind of neoplatonic realm of abstractions. So Nagel says some version of that must be the case. But Nagel chops off his nose despite his face by denying theism and doubling down on an incoherent category like what he already rejected in naturalism because neoplatonism just doesn't make any sense. It's literally incoherent. What does it even mean to say that the law of non-contradiction exists not as a concept in the mind, but just abstractly as a thing into itself? How would such an abstraction causally interact with the cosmos such that the cosmos would be subject to it let alone incorporate it into its fabric of being such that nothing can exist or be true within the cosmos that violates such a law? Nagel's neoplatonic world just cannot possibly be an explanation categorically because it just is conceptually vacuous and incoherent. However, we do understand what a law of logic is conceptually as a principle of true thought within a mind and further, God as a person with intentionality and authority can create, impose and enforce on his creation these concepts such that we have a logical world. So this overcomes the causality problem inherent in the abstract objects of neoplatonism. So what we're left with is if natural explanations fail and platonic explanations fail then what we have left is agency specifically based on the attributes of the facts under explanation a transcendent, objective, absolute, spaceless, timeless, immaterial, omnirational, personal mind. And this is just what we classically mean by God. Therefore, we have a strong abductive reason to believe God is the best explanation for these fundamental features of reality. Notice this means that God is necessary for our ability to even reason in the first place. So that we can reason becomes explicable only within a theistic worldview. Now, let me shift to two common objections I see from atheists and try to speak to them to help advance the dialogue that'll follow. These are the issues of brute facts and Occam's razor. First, brute facts. At this point in these discussions a common tactic many take is to simply question why we need to conceptually ground transcendental facts like the laws of logic in the first place. Can we not simply appeal to ignorance or agnosticism and say we don't know what grounds them or make even the harder claim that they need no grounding at all, that they are brute facts? For isn't that what the Christian does with God anyway? Couple of thoughts. First, God is not a brute fact. God is a self-existing necessary fact and such a fact does have a grounding for why it exists. The self-contained necessity of its own being that is not an ungrounded or ungroundable fact. So if Matt wants to say that the theist does the same thing with God as he may try to do with the transcendental facts of reality he's simply mistaken. On the other hand the transcendental facts of reality do not seem to be self-existent necessary facts especially on a naturalistic worldview. So on naturalism we could imagine that nothing exists has ever existed or will ever exist. Ignore the semantic problems with saying that nothing exists. To escape this Matt would need deposit along with Nagel some kind of neoplatonic realm that eternally existed abstractly even if no natural cosmos ever existed. But then my previous objections to that would apply and Matt would then be committing himself to a category of explanation which I doubt he's willing to do. Also claiming ignorance of an explanation isn't a valid response either. One's own ignorance or personal incredulity are not objections. They're just statements of a personal disposition. Imagine Matt gave all kinds of good arguments and evidence for evolution and someone responded, well that's great but isn't it possible that you have the wrong explanation or that you've added an explanation that isn't needed? Therefore it's more rational to withhold belief than it is to believe. Certainly Matt would think that this person is free to remain skeptical or agnostic if they wish but I doubt he would take that as a reasonable defeater for his belief or his arguments. So saying that there could potentially be some otherwise unknown or unstated possibly better explanation than God as an abductive explanation may sound nice to the skeptics but it's not actually a reasonable response and this leads to a more common response that some atheists give. Some version of I don't know position which honestly Matt himself often couples with an almost fetishized use of Occam's razor. Now Matt has often correctly noted that Occam's razor is not that more simple explanations are de facto preferred. That would just be silly and falsified so often that it wouldn't even be helpful as a rule. So Matt's absolutely right to point out that the rule is that we ought not multiply entities beyond reason but I've argued I hope successfully that positing God as an abductively best explanation is not only beyond not only not beyond reason and in fact is the most reasonable explanation for logic and our ability to reason itself but it also does not multiply entities or explanations since it only posits one. Remember, we're seeking an explanation for various transcendental facts and the Christian posits a single entity as an explanation for all of them. The atheist however would either need to deny explanation and appeal to brute facts which I showed already doesn't work or he would need to come up with some explanation for these transcendental facts by appeal to explanations that are not God. The atheist simply doesn't have a single possible candidate for all of these features and thus would necessarily multiply explanations up to potentially one for each individual fact possibly dozens while again the theist would still only have one. In addition to this, when we're exploring what makes a robust and rational explanation simplicity just isn't the only metric. There are numerous other explanatory virtues. There's internal coherence and consistency, the lowest level of ad hocness, explanatory power and explanatory scope to name a few. And as an explanation, God is an exemplar in each of these metrics making it a very powerful explanation as an entire matrix. And this not only is not only true for the transcendental facts like those listed above but also for other big facts of reality like why there is something rather than nothing specified complexity of genetic information, the fine tuning of the constants and quantities of the initial state of the universe, the existence of rational and moral agency, the facts surrounding the resurrection of Jesus from the dead and so forth. So Matt might want to point to my new show within the creation such as possible prayer experiments. But the question is if atheism does even engage the big things right and the theism does then why think atheism is more plausible? So to that end, given the transcendental facts of reality and what we know about them, one has a high abductive warrant for belief in God as the one ground of being for all reality. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Next, we will switch it over for Matt's opening statement. Thank you very much, Tyler. And Matt, thanks so much for being here. The floor is all yours. Great. Thanks for having me. I appreciate Tyler being here. I don't know, I don't know. I'm always interested to see if we can find some common ground but I think Tyler may have undercut the possibility of some common ground here. Is there good evidence for God? This is a much better question than what we are often presented with which is, is there evidence for God? And I like many other people have in the process human beings are subject to hyperbole was, oh, there's no evidence for God. Well, that's not strictly true in the sense that people constantly note, well, there's anecdotal evidence and accounts and things like that. And so it's much better for us to address is there good evidence for God just as it would be a good question to ask is there good evidence for any proposition? And so the question that becomes what makes evidence good? And here is perhaps where we're gonna have our biggest disagreement because it's easy to view this as a purely subjective exercise. It's difficult to define what counts as good evidence and each individual is going to have some subjective assessment of what they consider good. And the temptation is to merely base it on what an individual finds compelling or convincing. The problem is that we know that people can be convinced for bad reasons and with bad evidence. And the fact that we can know that means that we can assess things at least in a nearly unbiased fashion or at least removing as much bias as we can to say, ah, this person has believed something for bad reasons. And that implies that we can identify the difference between bad reasons and good reasons. This is the foundation of why we dig in on epistemology to find out how can we justify saying we know something or that we are reasonably warranted in believing something. So perfect and incomplete. It is an attempt to be as objective and unbiased as possible, something that we cannot actually do. I gotta notice that my internet connection is unstable. Hopefully I didn't get cut off, but we have formed, we have not yet formed a perfect epistemology. We've done a good job at eliminating some problematic issues. We've identified that if we put together epistemological syllogisms, we can identify fallacies. Antithelogical, if a syllogism is fallacious, that means the conclusion is unreliable. It doesn't mean the conclusion is necessarily false. When we're assessing people's accounts of things, which we seem to be limited by our sense of information. And so I'm going to experience a world and you're gonna experience a world and we're gonna try to communicate and relay what experiences we've had with that. Unfortunately, we know that people lie. We know that people exaggerate. We know that people reach flawed conclusions, have sloppy interpretations, that we have bad memories, that we're subject to peer pressure and manipulation. This does not in any way mean that everything everyone says is wrong. It just means we have to, testimony is notoriously bad. We also know that we're bad at understanding and relaying our personal experiences. The know-thyself kind of paradigm is a great instruction, but the question is how well can we actually know ourself? So when somebody comes to me with an account of something that is supernatural or extraordinary, I'm certainly willing to believe that they had an experience and that they are honestly trying to accurately relay that experience. But that doesn't mean that the story that they are relaying is accurate or that the conclusions that they've reached are warranted. So when we're evaluating evidence, there's two components. There are the data, the facts that are presented, which are the evidence. And then there is the assessment of those to determine the quality and quantity of that evidence. And does it rise to the level of a warranting belief in the proposed explanation that the evidence is for? So when the question of this debate is, is there good evidence for God? I have to look at this as if, what are the points of evidence? And does this reliably point to the proposition that a God is the explanation? When we're evaluating evidence, it would be ideal evidence would be repeatable independently verifiable, strongly tied to a specific discrete hypothesis. And our hypotheses cannot be vague, which is a constant problem of someone arguing for some nondescript deistic, theistic God as a foundation for something. And then moving from that to a specific God, there's a little leapfrog there. And ideally it should be falsifiable. There should be some way to demonstrate that if this were not to be the case to show that it is in fact, not the case. The closer our evidence is to that best standard, the more reasonable it is to consider it good evidence. So for example, if we're talking about something like causation, we tend to look for causes that are both necessary and sufficient. And amongst a potential set of causes, we look for causes that are proximal both with regard to geography and time. We shouldn't rely on the butterfly effect, no matter how intriguing of a proposition it is to trace causes back and back and back and say, oh, no, this isn't Matt's fault. This is Matt's great, great, great, great grandfather's fault or it's the fault of a lizard in Matt's backyard that did this, that put him in this particular mood that we go for proximal causes. So when we're talking about evidence for a proposition, what we're doing is something far closer to determining causality, even if it's not a true causal relationship. It often is the case when we're looking at the evidence and then finding what the evidence points to, that's what we're claiming the evidence is for. So if we find a dead body and we start gathering evidence, those data are important, but the narrative we derive from that evidence is what we're talking about when we say evidence for a proposition, the proposition being here is the individual who committed this murder or the way in which they committed this murder. There's an old adage that, when you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras. But we know that's not always true because we know that zebras exist as well. And that sort of an abductive reasoning about trying to come up with the most likely explanation is at best spurious or unreliable. And so we're just saying, hey, we have some reasonable confidence that if I'm in Texas and there's hoof prints, it's probably gonna be a horse, but it could possibly be a zebra. The thing is, could it also be a centaur or a minotaur or a unicorn? Hey, unicorn. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, both in quality and in quantity. And something that points to a discreet, for example, unicorn hypothesis. Unicorns, by the way, aren't really outlandish extraordinary creatures when you just consider the physical attributes. Essentially, we're talking about a horse with a horn. That's not only plausible, it wouldn't be all that surprising to find that there are other horned animals that are closer related that at some point there was something horse-ish-like with a horn or that we might find something like that. It's the magical properties of the unicorns that move us well into the extraordinary. We aren't aware of a horse with a horn right now, but the hoof prints of a horse would certainly be consistent with the unicorn. And it's a mistake to say, here are hoof prints, this is consistent with the unicorn, and that somehow demonstrates the likelihood of the plausibility that there is a magical creature that is attracted to virgins and lives in the wood and whose horn has magical healing powers or whatever else we're going to attribute to a unicorn. It's not enough to claim that the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis. It has to be discretely tied to the specifics of the hypothesis. And if we don't begin with a specific hypothesis, then we're already beginning with vagaries that can lead us far astray. Hoof prints are consistent with both horses and unicorns, but even if we found a horse with a horn, that doesn't confirm the other claims about unicorns. So what about gods? What do we know about a God? What hypothesis can we have about a God that would allow us to set it up as some sort of discrete hypothesis that things can point to? Quite often, we don't get anywhere near a robust definition of a God. What we get is something vague or generalized, the God of classical theism with its various omnis or some kind of abstract thinking mind that serves as a grounding for something, or the vague creator of order or the universe. And this plays itself out in conversations that I've had many times, which is like somebody's like, oh, look at the trees, as if looking at the trees is evidence for God or look at order in the universe or look at the laws of logic. And we get to a point where it's, we have something for which we would like to have an explanation. We don't necessarily have an explanation. We can't come up with a better explanation and that people go leaping towards a God. Oh, well, how are you gonna ground your morality? How are you gonna tell a reason reliably unless there's some God serving as a foundation for this? There must be something nondescript at the beginning. Personal accounts and testimonials are often also used. It certainly counts as evidence. The problem is that you can accumulate as many of these as you want and you don't get to the standpoint where we have good evidence to believe something. Personal accounts are thinking like, well, God delivered me from alcoholism and I certainly couldn't do it on my own, fall into the Dumbo's magic feather category. How do we know that in fact, you could not do that on your own? How do we know that a God intervene? What do we know about a God and how do we infer what it can or cannot do? How do we know what it wants or what it does? How can we tell if it's interacting with reality at all? If people look at and interpret things within reality as if it comes from a God, how can we show that there's a strong tie from the observed evidence to the discrete proposition? If we go to abductive arguments, we have to have a way to determine a list of candidate explanations and to understand that we have ruled out certain explanations so that we know we have a candidate list that is as close to exhaustive as we can get. We have to have a way of determining which of those is more likely. We can't just say, oh, well, we haven't come up with a naturalistic explanation and therefore this justifies us leaping to supernatural explanations. We need some data to determine how often the proposed X is the cause of the effect Y in order to make a determination of how likely something has a cause or how comparatively likely the probabilities are that this is the better explanation. I don't know how anyone could do this with a God where we have no confirmed examples of a God ever doing anything. It's all inference. It's all unfalsifiable suspicions, appeals to ignorance or abstractions. So I'm not aware of any good evidence for God. I'm not aware of anyone demonstrating that there even could be good evidence for God or for anything supernatural. We don't have a mechanism by which we could explore supernatural causation or intervention. We don't get to just say, hey, we haven't found a natural explanation for it. So therefore my supernatural explanation is possible, plausible, likely or proved. The entire history of apologetics is one of trying to mold arguments and evidence to the conclusion that someone has already reached and attempt to prop up a God hypothesis that is ill-defined, malleable and unfalsifiable. Is it more likely that we're desperately trying to ease our discomfort with not knowing or that there is in fact a God who's playing an amazing game of hide and seek, playing favorites with private revelations and staring at a world that has no coherent model of who that being actually is. If there were a God, that God should be able to easily provide good evidence. And by that I mean evidence that nearly anyone would consider good evidence. We wouldn't have to have any discussion about whether or not, oh, you know, we're not gonna be able to provide empirical evidence. We're not gonna be able to provide material evidence. We're not gonna be able to do this sort of testing. We wouldn't have to have an argument about what qualifies as good evidence. If there were in fact the kind of Omni God or the classical theism God that Tyler and others are advocating for, there would be no need for a debate. Suggesting that good evidence already exists is essentially suggesting that nonbelievers are a mix of unintelligent, dishonest or delusional. And while that may be true for some, it certainly doesn't ring true in the larger sense. Especially when you consider that the proponents of the purported good evidence gods don't seem to agree on what the evidence is or what it means or what God it points to or the characteristics of that God. And many believers scoff at the very idea of providing evidence for a God and suggest that it's merely a faith-based position that cannot be proved. So while I was interested in hearing what Tyler would consider good evidence and whether we can come to some agreement on how good it is or isn't, it seems that we started off with, hey, I'm not gonna be providing anything that Matt or other people would actually consider good evidence because this thing is in a different category. And that's absolutely fine to say that it's in a different category that it doesn't fit in with these particular rules. But then you have to come up with a mechanism by which you can show that the evidence you're presenting counts as evidence and not just inferences because you want there to be some grounding or foundation for something that you haven't even demonstrated has one. Just that if it doesn't have one, oh no, we can't count it reliable because if God serves as the foundation for logic and God can, as Tyler said, create these laws, then it would seem reasonable that God could then change these laws, which means there is no reliable grounding there either that the only thing you have is confidence that, hey, there's a God as a foundation and he's not gonna change this stuff. And yet you still haven't done anything to demonstrate the subject of the debate, which is, is there good evidence for God? Essentially what we've started with is I'm gonna throw out everything that would normally be considered good evidence for reaching a conclusion. I'm going to deny your epistemology. I'm going to then insert an abductive argument because that's what will work best for the thing that I'm trying to argue for. And this is why I think we may be stuck because whether or not Tyler or somebody else accepts that, I cannot accept that as good evidence. You bet. Thank you very much, Matt, for that opening statement. Now we will go into the 60 minutes of open conversation setting a timer just to be sure we stick with that 60 minutes and then we'll go into the Q and A. So gentlemen, thanks so much again for being here and the floor is yours. You wanna start or? Yeah, sure. I, a couple of thoughts. I mean, I was trying to frantically write down as much as I could because there was a lot of kind of, I don't mean this in a bad way. There was a lot of kind of scattered thoughts that I'm not sure I heard an actual argument all the way through. The first half, I'm not sure I really disagreed with much besides the implication that you wanted to draw from it of a kind of logical, positive, and empiricism. The use of logical fallacies and reasoning and all, there's not much I disagreed with. What you're doing is, what it seems to me that you're doing is kind of like playing, I don't mean this pejoratively, it's kind of like playing fetch with the dog, where you throw a ball, the dog go gets the ball and I'm saying, okay, I threw the ball and you're saying, but that's the ball and I say, great, but I threw you the ball and you say, but that's the ball and I say, great, but I threw you the ball, right? So you're pointing to that common ground of reasoning and logic and the process. And my argument is, okay, that's all well and great. That's the common ground I conceded. The question is, what is the possible foundation for those and are they true? I'm hoping you're interested in what's true and not merely what's pragmatic. And so this is why, and I took a bunch of notes while you were talking, we're in agreement. Let's just say we're in agreement that the, we'll just stick with identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle as the foundations of reason. The thing that I'm not convinced is that anyone has demonstrated that there is or could be some justification or some foundation behind that because you'd have to show that this isn't just the way things are. And I understand that it would be nice to say, ah, we have shown that this is an inviolate foundation. I just don't see how we can actually get there because one of those things where you would have to assume they were true in order to use them in the first place. And so rather, you're taking an extra step in saying, I think we have described something that is, you know, these transcendence must exist in a timeless, spaceless realm. Well, that is a step further than I can go because I don't look at them as extant things or don't see the need to create a separate realm because imagine there was nothing. Hey, I realize this is incredibly difficult. Now we're going into a universe from nothing crap which I'm not gonna do. But those things would still be true because nothing is nothing, it's not not nothing and everything is either nothing or not nothing. Those things would also be true in any realm that I could imagine. And they seem to be true whether or not there is a God. And so the curious thing is, is that if you think that God can create these laws of logic, can God change them? Yeah, so I think, let me try to help. I think there might be a slight misunderstanding in how you're understanding not only the concepts that we're dealing with or the argument that's being made because you said a couple of things like, oh, well, you basically cast the argument as, well, I don't know, so therefore it'd be really nice if God was there, which wasn't the argument that I made at all, that type of psychologizing. You just missed, you just, you repeatedly dismissed the notion that it was okay to say I don't know, which I would object. I didn't dismiss it as okay to say I don't know. That's why I even gave the example that it might be permissible for you to remain a skeptic. That might be very good, but for someone who has a robust argument and evidence for something, your incredulity about something is not a defeater for it, right? I didn't say, what, I'm wondering what the actual evidence is, but you said God can create these laws. No, no, no. You did, I wrote it down as you said it, God can create these laws. No, actually I said that God can create the universe that coheres to those laws. I hold it as, I'm an idealist for it. Maybe I misspoke, maybe I misheard, whatever. But I wrote that down because it seemed really strange that someone would say God can create these laws because that suggests that he can change them. But if God can't change them, then he's bound by them, which means they transcend God. No, because this is where I want to back up. Because you properly said, and I get that, that's why I said it my own. Let's ignore the semantics of saying nothing exists. You know, we all get the problems with that. Yeah, you and I both agree that's silly. Yeah, but I know what you mean. This is where I was bringing up Nagel, right? Nagel was pointing out, well, natural explanations, they just, naturalism just fails epistemologically to ground all these transcendental facts of reality. It just categorically does not work for any of them, right? There's an atheist philosopher arguing this, and he's been pretty successful in defending that. And he goes on to say basically what you did, which is, well, they'd be true even if there was no, even if nothing existed, right? Which is why he's stuck saying, and I was interested to hear you admit that because that effectively is, I think whether you're comfortable with it or not, that effectively is that kind of that non-theistic neoplatonism where you have this realm, quote unquote realm, I don't, it's not a spatial place or anything like that, of these abstractions that just exist as truths. They just exist as these propositional abstractions, but in neoplatonism, the question that I have and one of the arguments that I made for why it's true, remember, I'm not just saying, well, we don't know they're for God. The argument is we know what it means for these conceptions to be true as concepts in minds. We 100% know what that means in 100% of analogous situations. We know what it means for these to exist abstractly in minds. It's exceptionally incoherent to say that they simply exist, that the law of non-contradition just exists in and of itself. So first of all, I have a problem when we start saying exists because I view these as descriptives and not prescriptives. They are a description of the way things are. The issue that I have is while we have an understanding of them, I don't see that we have an understanding of whether or not they require some foundation or what that foundation could be or why. Because if all we're saying, it's like saying, and we'll ignore the semantic portion of this, in base 10, what we mean by two plus two equals four is true. It doesn't mean that math requires some grounding or foundation, something to guarantee that this is in violent. As a matter of fact, math is deductively derived from identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle. That's as far back of a foundation as we can possibly get. And so the very notion that these could be otherwise seems absurd, but when we look at it and say we understand these, therefore, what is the foundation behind them or what is the reason that they are true? I don't know that that is even a cogent question because I don't see what the demonstration is that there needs to be some reason other than that they are true. What is wrong with something just being the way it is? I would push you that you're kind of speaking out of both sides of your mouth a little bit. You're saying, we don't need an explanation, but I'm gonna give an explanation of them as descriptions of reality. You're attempting to provide an explanation. And there's- I'm not providing an explanation, say that, okay, here's the difference. I'm describing them, but I'm not providing a reason for why they are. You are, so you said that they're simply descriptions of reality, which I would then press also because you said even if reality didn't exist, they would still be true, but there'd be nothing for them to exist. There'd be no descriptions if nothing was there to describe. So that's already strange, but I would say actually you are trying to ground them. You're saying the ground of their truthfulness as descriptions just is that reality has this is-ness. No, I'm saying how did you rule that out? So when we're going through, even for an abductive argument, we look at all the possible things. One of them is that this is just the way things are and they don't require a justification or foundation. A faith-based fact. And the other one is that they do. And so I don't know how you ruled out that they just are. I'm not saying that they just are. I'm saying I don't know how that was ruled out. Well, I mean, I don't have enough faith to believe that in brute facts, it's just that there's no evidence it's just a brute fact. But beyond that, the reason for that is because that means that these laws of logic are, remember I went through all those attributes. That would mean they're contingent and arbitrary. Right? This is when you go to, this is when you go to, well, that means if they are descriptions of reality. Okay, when I say descriptions of reality, they are descriptive of everything, including nothing. Not just the reality that we experience. This is why the laws of logic are viewed as universal and in violet. That even in the absence of our universe or in some other universe, these things would all still apply. Well, I'm not sure that that actually follows and I'm not actually sure that there's descriptions of nothing that nothing has no attributes to describe. I get it. I'm just saying that in the, you can't even do it. Okay, here's a big nothing. Now let's see if we can come up with an abstract concept. You can't because there's no mind there to even process this. But if the- But if there was a mind, it's all crowded. No, no, no. Because you can do this in the sense of like in a theory of mind where you can say if there was this situation, this thing would still be true that nothing would still be nothing and not nothing. But notice now you've doubled down. You've made them now doubly contingent. So not only would they be arbitrary, they're now contingent upon this conditional thought experiment that you have. They're not contingent on that. That's just how I'm using it. So can we not use thought experiments to reach a conclusion? I'm not saying that the laws of logic are contingent upon this. I'm saying that when we think about these and we imagine a scenario, like people will email me on occasion. Maybe this will clear it up. People will email me on occasion and say, oh, well the laws of identity, non-contradiction excluded middle are violated by quantum mechanics and quantum indeterminacy. And my response to them is always the same. No, they're not. Because they don't tell you anything about the features of something or the properties of something. They just say that it is what it is. And so if something is non-determinant, then it's non-determinant. And it's not non- not non-determinant. You know what I'm getting at. And so these things apply at every discrete level. Now, if somebody could show that there was a scenario where they didn't apply, okay, that would undermine it. But that doesn't explain why they couldn't just be the way things are, why there needs to be an additional foundation. And the foundation that you're proposing, I don't know how that does anything to add to our understanding or their usefulness or to show that that foundation is true and that that foundation can't be violated. Like, can God change them? Yeah, and this is where I would continue just to push back and say, I just don't have enough faith to hold brute facts like that. These are features that we can describe and give descriptions of their contingency, right? We can, while they're necessary facts, when we talk about what they are, right? You're somewhat moving the goalpost because you're going from, they could have existed apart from anything existing, but they exist as descriptions of things, even nothing, even though nothing, it doesn't have any attributes to describe, right? So there's this kind of jello effect that's happening in the way you're trying to describe them without pinning down what they actually are. And I'm gonna say, well, going back to yours, you said things like, oh, well, the God of Classical Theism, the Omni, the Creator, all this kind of stuff. Well, that's too vague to be helpful. And I'm gonna say, well, your only escape just is this kind of nailing jello to a wall that they're descriptions, but there's nothing really to describe and they always existed, but they describe what actually exists. That is like the epistemological version of the flying spaghetti monster. It's just all over the place. Whatever you want to describe the attributes are in the moment for who you're ever talking to, to avoid the burden. It's not just not helpful in that as a rejoinder to the argument that I've actually given. So the big difference, so that's not remotely what it is. The big difference here is that I'm not offering an explanation for the laws of logic. I'm not even saying that they don't require one. I'm saying that nobody's made any demonstration that they do require one or do have one. You are offering one up and when I challenge you on this, you're just like, well, I don't have enough faith to hold the brute facts like that. My position in getting to what you suggested earlier is the one that is multiplying entities the least. I'm not proposing here is the foundation for the laws of logic. I'm saying you're proposing a foundation for the laws of logic and I don't see that we've even made a case that they can or should have a foundation. And when I point that out, you're just like, well, I don't have enough faith to hold the brute facts. Well, I don't have enough faith to just say, okay, if we don't know something and there's no demonstration that we do or that this thing has an explanation that is approachable and reachable by us, that I should just go leaping towards one because somebody claims, oh, well, it must be timeless faceless. And we've proposed to this being who's also timeless faceless for which we have no good evidence which is the whole point of this debate is their good evidence. And you just started off by saying, well, we're not gonna talk about that kind of evidence. We're gonna have this other thing. Yeah, I can get that. I mean, part of me, your response just begs, largely begs the question. It says, I don't accept your argument is true because I just don't accept your argument is true because I don't accept that this is a good explanation for something because I don't think that there's a good explanation for them having an explanation. So that just begs the question of the falsity of the argument to begin with. So you're somewhat moving in a circle in that sense, but we can go to evidence, right? We can go to the reason why I'm simply not gonna play on the logical positivist ground. Okay, I don't know why you keep going to logical positivist. I don't know what that has to do with me, but okay. That's the standard of evidence that you've stated so far. It's a neological positivism. This has been a common critique. I'm sure it's not the first time you've heard it. The reason why, if you don't like the label of logical positivist, you should understand then why I say that I'm not going to play on the logical positivist ground, right? If you're gonna say I'm not a logical positivist, right? Then you should have no problem with me saying, I'm not gonna play on a logical positivist ground because you are not a logical positivist then. Is that correct? No, you're not. The issue is that you keep going to something, rather than having a conversation about what I've actually said and what my actual positions are, you're gonna toss out, oh, I'm not gonna play on the logical positivist ground. I don't know whether or not what I'm saying qualifies under your understanding of logical positivism or not. I'm just talking about, when we're talking about having the best epistemology, when we're talking about having good reasons for something, there are some things that we, like it's the reason courts don't allow spectral evidence anymore. That sort of thing gets ruled out because it is necessarily unreliable. And I'm not saying that the only way to know something is to be able to put it into a beaker. I'm fine with reasoning and arguments that are backed up by evidence, but I'm going to need some sort of empirical evidence at some point in this chain in order to ground it. Now, if you wanna talk about, like I don't need, so two plus two, I'm fine with abstractions of mathematical, but that can be demonstrated that that is the case. And this is why we both agree on identity non-contradiction excluded middle. And it's why we're stuck when you try to go a step further than that, because those things, while we can agree on them, we can also put them into practical use and show that they continue to produce results. So there's sort of a pragmatic, these are my presupposition, but they are borne out by pragmatic testing. And if ever we reach a point where we find out that the laws of logic are somehow not universal or not reliable, well, that's gonna be a ground-shaking undermining of everything related to reason, but it does not mean that I think I have a foundation for them. Yeah, and I would, again, I think that I provided a good argument for an explanation and a foundation for them. I think you provided an argument. Largely dismissed it, so we can move on from that, because so far you haven't actually dealt with the argument. It's been, I just don't like abduction. Well, no, no, no. Well, first of all, the argument was valid, but there's no demonstration of soundness and demonstrating that it is sound is where the evidence comes in. So if we're gonna have a debate on is there good evidence for God, you don't just get to say, well, I think I presented a good argument because this isn't about a good argument. It's about a sound argument and a sound argument is backed by good evidence. A good argument would be a sound argument, so. But there are people, so there's a difference between validity and soundness. So I'm saying, what's the evidence that shows that the premise is true? And so this is where I'm pushing that I think the standard you've given is a logical, positive one, whether you like it or not. Because for you, what counts as evidence for something, that evidence of a syllogism, right? I mean, I spent about eight minutes hashing out actually and defending the premises of the argument from good, abductive reasoning and implication, right? That's a perfectly valid and sound way to argue in any philosophical discourse, except with a logical posivist. That's why you're having the reaction to it that you're having. Because you want there to be repeatable, empiricable, independent, tied to a hypothesis, all these things, which is fan, I'm not saying that the scientific method in empiricism is a bad kind of way to do things. The question is, if it's the only way, and if it's the only way that we can reasonably believe in certain things. And I would push back and say, like I did in the beginning, one, that standard itself cannot meet its own evidentiary weight. And so you're believing it contrary to its own evidentiary standard, which you claim, which is a problem. You have no evidence for it directly. So you have no empirical evidence for it, which is a problem. No, it's about what is the... Okay, would we agree that we could perhaps divide propositions into two categories, those which are subject to scientific investigation and testing, and those which are not? Provisionally, sure. I don't know how that could be any... I mean, that's a direct logical negation. It has to be true by the laws of logic, that the propositions fall into two categories, those which are demonstrable under scientific investigation and those which are not. That's a direct logical negation that has to be two categories. I have some caveats to it, but provisionally, sure. How can you have caveats to X and not X while you're sitting here talking about the laws of logic? For the same reason I could say, well, the explanation is God or not God. What falls into not God, there could be a whole host of things that falls into not God. I haven't mentioned anything at all about what falls into either category. I'm just trying to get to agreement that those are two categories which are exhaustive and mutually exclusive, things which can be demonstrated scientifically and things which cannot. Provisionally, yes. Keep going, please. It's frustrating to have someone come in to talk about the laws of logic and you draw the simplest or next almost simplest Venn diagram, just to get to a point of agreement to make a point. I'm agreeing with you to move on. No, you're providing provisional ascent. This makes me wonder if you actually understand the laws of logic because if there's X and not X and I provided categories that are X and not X, why would you ever give provisional ascent? For the same reason actually, you should be very happy with this because when you go against a lot of presubstitialists who want to argue that it's God or not God, that actually causes all kinds of problems because there are other options that are available for it even though strictly speaking, that is a disjunctive. So again, I don't think it's gonna be a substantive issue. That's why I said provisionally, go for it. Sure, go for it. There's things that can be scientifically proven and things that cannot be scientifically proven. Great. Can God be scientifically proven? It depends on what you mean. You're gonna have people that are gonna say, it depends on what you mean. It doesn't depend. It does because. Can God make himself scientifically provable? It depends on what you mean by it because if you mean by, the reason why I say it depends is because I don't know conceptually exactly what you mean by it. If by scientifically verifiable, you mean something like repeatable, independent, empirical direct evidence, the answer is gonna be no. God can't do that? If you mean something, God cannot make something natural that is non-natural. That's like saying, can God make a married bachelor? So no, God cannot make empirical evidence for non-empirical facts. So God can't take human form and provide evidence of his divinity? He did. So let me finish. This is where I'm going. This is why you would have some people who would say, there can be empirical facts that serve as a proposition or a premise within a syllogism that leads to the conclusion that God exists. That's not the same thing as saying there is direct scientific evidence for God directly. This is what I'm saying. It just depends on what you mean. That's not what I asked. I didn't ask if there was already direct scientific evidence of God. I asked if God could provide scientific evidence of God. In the indirect, yes, God could provide and many people have made arguments, cosmological arguments, fine-tuning arguments, that there are scientific empirical facts and reality that serve as evidence within broader arguments for the existence of God. That's not the same thing as saying there can be direct scientific evidence of a non-natural entity, for example. Those are two different things. That's why I'm saying there's nuance in these. This is actually where I want to push back as well on you. When we say something like there's good evidence for God, one of my frustrations in dealing with atheists, I was happy that you said, it's hyperbole to say there's no evidence. I wasn't happy that you said, well, people can claim whatever they want. For example, I think there are good arguments for atheism, problem of evil, for example. I can concede to my opponent. I apologize, Tyler. That's incredibly ironic as I'm on record as being really, really, like I almost never use the problem of evil. I don't think it's a particularly good argument. Go ahead. So I should clarify. I think the existential version of the argument can be powerful, compelling evidence for people. Oh, I think it can be convincing. Whether or not an argument is convincing is independent from whether it's good. I understand that as well. So one of what I would hope for is at least a level of saying, look, I can see why people would be, that would be a good argument for something. Yeah. When it comes down to, well, I just, they just always believe I'm bad at evidence. Yeah, okay. No, for clarity, I can see that point. I can see why people are convinced and think that they have good evidence and good argument for God. I can see why you are convinced of what you're saying. I can, I may be wrong about the reasons why you find it compelling, but I can at least see that. Okay. So one of the frustration that I have is then when I push back and say, okay, let's go tabula rasa, right? Let's pretend, let's go holy on your evidentiary standard, right? Let's go repeatable, independent, tied to hypothesis can't be vague and it has to be falsifiable. For those things which, so I'm not talking about abstractions. I'm not talking about, okay, go ahead. Good. So if I were to ask you, and I know, I've seen enough of your debates. I know you've been challenged with this before. This isn't gonna be new. I'm not trying to get you a gotcha or catch you off guard. But I didn't, honestly, didn't like your answer then. So I'll see if over the years it's gotten better. Is what evidence, right? So what evidence would falsify your epistemology or serve as what you considered good evidence for God? If, and you can correct me. This is something that I think is built into your system. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I think that built in there because you said things like extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which I think is not true. But if you think that a natural explanation is always intrinsically more plausible than a supernatural explanation, because we have direct evidence of other like natural explanations. And on your view, we have no direct evidence of supernatural explanations, right? That seems to be an assumption. It's very, it's very humane assumption that natural explanations are always intrinsically more plausible than supernatural ones, right? My question then is what actually would qualify as good evidence that you would accept for the existence of God that could not simply be dismissed by saying it could be aliens. It could be our minds deceiving us. We have more pattern forming. It could be anecdotal, right? It could be quantum weirdness or, and you brought this up, or I don't know why that could just be the way the natural world is, right? If all those are more plausible in your epistemology, then God did it. What evidence could ever be counted that would falsify your epistemology? Sure, so there was a lot early on that got confused, so I'm glad you got around to the question of what it was because you started off with what would falsify my epistemology? What would prove God? Then you went to natural explanations or intrinsically more plausible and you don't think extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which is bizarre. So I hope that we can get back to that at some point. The answer that I gave, which you're not gonna like, but I'll expand on it a little bit more, is I have no idea, but if there is a God, that God should know exactly what it would take to convince me, what it would take to convince anybody and should be capable of doing so. It would be arrogant of me to think that I can tell the difference between a God and something that is so much more powerful or has a better understanding of or is able to manipulate physics and do delusions. However, this is why I asked about whether or not God was capable of making himself scientifically verifiable. Because if he's not, then we're stuck forever. And if he is, then why hasn't he done it? To do this sort of thing where he presents himself in some sense that is undeniable, verifiable, it's not a problem that I don't know how that can be achieved. It's a problem that it hasn't been achieved because I'm not the one claiming God-like understanding of the universe, you're claiming that there's a God who has that understanding. And so if there's a God that can demonstrably provide evidence of its existence in nature in such a way that I would no longer be able to say, hey, how do I know this isn't aliens or how do I know I'm not delusional? Then that is something that should have happened. But to suggest that my position on this, of not being so arrogant as to think that I could rule out delusion or technology or whatever else is somehow problematic with my epistemology is fundamentally flawed because now we're in this position it is. We're in this position because you think there's a God who created me, who gave me a mind and placed me in a universe where we cannot rule out those things. Well, no, because that, like you're basically what you said was, we're stuck forever, but that just assumes your epistemology. I don't think we're stuck forever because I'm not a logical positivist. How did you rule out delusion? Have you had an experience with a God? Have I had an experience with a God? I'm gonna say yes, but probably not what you're thinking. I'm not thinking anything because people are... I wanna continue my question though because this is why I don't like your answer because you set up your epistemology as basically the scientific method effectively, right? Would you ever consider a good scientific methodology to say my thesis must be falsifiable? But I have no clue what the hell would falsify it. Would that ever qualify for you as a good scientific way to go about understanding a topic or coming to a position? Well, that's not about understanding a topic. That is about the foundation. And so the fact that there are limits to the foundation is the very problem. I didn't create the universe. I didn't set things up so that there are a number of possibilities and incomplete knowledge. I'm looking at the universe and saying, look, how can I best understand? How can I best come to reliable understandings of this? It's not the fault of science that there's supposedly a God that works in a supernatural way that isn't testable or verifiable by science. That's not a fault of the scientific method. That doesn't mean that that epistemology is in any way flawed. What it means is that if you, what? I'm not blaming, I'm not saying that's a fault of the scientific method. It's the fault of the God. No. Yes, yes, it is. If there is in fact a God, if there is in fact a God who sets up a universe where scientific methodology is the single most consistently reliable way to understand truth. And an absence of perfect knowledge and understanding means that we cannot, nobody's demonstrated any mechanism by which we can investigate supernatural. They haven't shown that the supernatural exists. They haven't shown that the supernatural can interfere with the natural world. They can't even show that a God answers intercessory prayer or anything like that. There's no demonstration of a mechanism. If God has set up this system such that he and all of his machinations are separate from the way we look at the world to determine what is real and what is not, then that fault lies with God. And why would a God ever do that for the single most important question anybody could ever consider? Why would it have a fundamentally different understanding that flies in the face of reason and evidence? Which just begs the question that it flies in the face of reason. I've given good abductive reasons to think that God is the best only foundation for why we can reason in the first place. But I wanna go back. I've asked you about all suffocations. No, I missed the last part of your sentence. I said I wanna go back because I'm still when you're saying a thesis, in order to be reasonable, in order to be true, in order to be pragmat, whatever it is, needs to be falsifiable. I keep going back and I'm saying, okay, Matt, if you have the opportunity to convince me, go for it. I'm going for it. I'm gonna be a logical positivist. I'm down with you, but I need falsifiability in order for me to hold this, to go full bore with Matt. There's gotta be falsifiability in this position, right? It's not ego, it's not pride, it's not arrogance to know the falsifiability of your own position. Falsifiability in which position? Because falsifiability is a component of the scientific methods. Okay, you're using the scientific method writ large as your evidentiary standard for your epistemology. So I'm asking you, on your epistemology, what is the falsifiability of your epistemic standard? A demonstration that something is true that doesn't... Let me give an example. Let me give an example. Roger Penrose calculated that the chances of the cosmos, the galaxy reorganizing 100% of its particles is about one times 10 to the 80th power, right? That's the chances that the galaxy will just randomly and spontaneous reorganize all the particles, which is somewhat terrifying even though that's really beyond mathematical possibility. If suddenly some of the stars re-rained and said, Matt, I'm Yahweh, I'm here, would something like that, right? If you're asking for evidence, empirical evidence, would something like that count as evidence for the existence of God? Yes. What is the feature about that? If you can say, well, I have no direct evidence for another God, but I have evidence that my mind is a pattern forming machine. I have evidence that this is mathematically possible in a quantum world. Why would you go, God did it, rather than any natural claim, or I don't know, but that's just a brute fact, that's just the way reality is. So I don't know if you caught it, but when you asked, would that be evidence for God, I said, yes, but that evidence for God is not confirmation of God. So would that actually count as evidence toward the proposition that there's God? Sure. Would that mean your standard? Is that sufficient in and on its own to convince me that there is a Yahweh God? No. And because there's a number of really good reasons for this, not the least of which is, how do I rule out other possibilities? But because this proposition is absurd, and I get it from apologists all the time, and I've tried a number of different ways to point out why it's absurd, and I think maybe today, maybe, maybe, if I'm really lucky, I can get to how actually absurd it is. A, this shit never happens. It never happens. And yet these are the propositions that somebody comes up to say, ooh, would this count? The second thing about it is, you have to consider what this looks like within the paradigm. So what we're saying is, there's a God Yahweh, and instead of directly communicating with me and providing incontrovertible, in uncontestable evidence, which he supposedly could be able to do, he's instead decided to write in the sky with stars. This is an absurd proposition from an all-powerful, all-knowing, benevolent being who's trying to communicate with me, his own creation supposedly. Why would he ever need to write stuff with stars in the sky when he can communicate directly with me in a way that eliminates the possibility of me saying, oh, that's technology, or delusion, or whatever else? All right, let me answer those three points, right? Never happens. That's the point, right? We're going to the farthest extreme to show that your bias actually, you're not objectively open to these things like you claim you, if your position is actually, if you're saying, what's good evidence for God? And I can say, literally God could rewrite the stars, and you say, yeah, but that's not really good evidence. I'm just going to say, I'm sorry, I just don't buy that you're really objectively open to an interested in evidence. I'm sorry, if that level of evidence doesn't rise to your evidentiary standard, I'm just not buying it. I already said that it would, I already said that it would be evidence for God. I said it wouldn't be completely. I immediately took it back and said, well, should it cause you to believe? No. It shouldn't. It shouldn't cause anybody on its own to believe. However, to say that I'm somehow closed to this, or the possibility of this is an outright lie, because what you would need to do is show that, hey, here's writing in the sky, or here's supernatural thing A, and we draw a line to demonstrate that it is undeniable that the single best explanation for this is that a God did it. I'm not close to that at all. You're not offering a pathway of here's this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this is why this is most reasonable. You're just saying, what if the stars are lying to spell this out, would that convince you on its own that there's a God? No, but would I be happy to say that that's good evidence towards the proposition? You bet, but there's still more work to be done. And even with that concession, your reply is, ah, you're just closed to it. Right, and let me explain, before cutting me off, let me explain why. Because when I say something, notice what you said. You say, would it be good evidence? Sure, but you need to show me incontrovertibly the link to God, and I'm gonna say, okay, but the standard that you've set up eliminates the possibility of incontrovertible link because you always could have any more plausible naturalist explanation or the out that you gave to the transcendent argument, which is, I don't know, but I have faith that this, how do you know this isn't just a brute fact of the way nature is? Or you've given yourself that out such that no evidence could have that direct link. So let me keep going through your three. Hang on, I haven't given myself any out because the God proposition fundamentally changes that. If God is capable of providing that evidence, that is the out. Okay, let me keep going through the declines. You then say, well, it's absurd because why would God have to do all that out there when he could speak to me directly with incontrovertible conclusion? Again, the reason, I understand that the stars is hyperbolically absurd, right? I'm intentionally making it that far out, right? Because what you basically said is incontrovertible evidence could be something like what Christians claim as the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit. God communicating directly to you such that you could believe, right? So my question is because you're not in your head, which I'm happy, but when I ask you, okay, great. You might think in this abstract context that that's good evidence, but then remember, you wanna say, well, in order for it to cause me to believe, again, we're not talking about what in the actual world would compel you to believe. Maybe you believe for bad reasons, whatever it is, an accident might cause you to believe tomorrow night, whatever it is. We're saying what should rationally cause you to believe. You've said in order for that to happen, right? In order for that to take place where it should cause me to believe, I shouldn't have this evidence in the abstract. I then should have a scientifically repeatable, independent, direct link from that evidence to God as the best explanation. That's not what I said. Okay, then I misinterpret, I'm not trying to misrepresent you. That's how I understood you say it. Do you explain it differently then? While I would, that is what I set up as the best, not what I set up as good or good enough to reach a rational conclusion. That is the ideal that we would go for, which I would argue should be achievable by God. However, I've acknowledged and I've done this many, many times that independent revelation from a God could be, and you said could be, and I'm agreeing with could be, which is why I was not violently nodding, could be sufficient to warrant belief. However, as Hume pointed out, and I'm agreeing with, revelation is necessarily first person and to everybody else it's hearsay. So your revelation does me no good. And so if Paul, as Paul on the road to Damascus has a revelation that actually could serve, and I don't know if it can or not, I don't know what, because I didn't experience it, could serve as something that would be evidence that would warrant belief. Why isn't a Damascus road experience good enough for all of us? Why are we talking about writing in the sky? Why are we talking about, is there a grounding for the laws of logic, or is Alvin Planting, I know you didn't bring it up, but I love mentioning it because I like saying his name, the Planting is modal logic version of the ontological argument, all of these things, all these things that a fraction of the population will ever remotely understand. Why is it this is what is offered for an abstract God? Why don't we all have a Damascus road experience? I'm not sure that it's necessary that we would. I disagree that there isn't sufficient evidence from all of the features of reality that I've described. So I simply don't agree with you that there isn't sufficient reason and that therefore we all need a Damascus road. Plenty of, I mean. Yes, but you don't think extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So it's not surprising that you don't agree. Because I think extraordinary claims, as any claim, require sufficient evidence. Yes, and the sufficient evidence for any claim is gonna be proportional to how outlandish that claim is. If I say I have a pet dog, I don't need all kinds of evidence to support that. If I say I have an invisible pet dragon, that's a more extraordinary claim and requires more than just my say so, and the dog tag. I'm guessing under you, both would just simply be present the dog or present the animal. Actually, I think it'd be probably the same level. And it would be the same level of evidence. Apologists would present the damn animal. Which I think we have, but I wanna go back and say. That's the Damascus road experience. Presenting the animal is the Damascus road experience. It's not writing in the sky and it's not arguing about the founding. But then I'm gonna go back and I'm gonna say again, for the Damascus road experience, again, you said, well, Hume points out we're very good at lying to people. Hume also points out we're very good at lying to ourselves. He's gonna say it's more plausible that we're deceived than not. So again, if you have a Damascus road experience, it seems like you're saying, the only way that God could convince me is by compelling me to believe based on what I would otherwise consider really bad evidence. Yes. Right? So what you're saying is the best evidence is bad evidence. Well, no, no, no. What I'm saying is that God should be capable of overcoming that hurdle and compelling belief. Yeah, capability isn't the problem with the argument here. So I'm again gonna go back and say, we still have nothing approaching falsifiability for your position, right? We still have an unfalsifiable, we still have an unfalsifiable standard, an unfalsifiable epistemology, an unfalsifiable worldview because no matter how much evidence, again, it could be stars in the sky, it could be God speaking to your heart, it could be a domestic road experience, it could always go back to it while it's hallucinating, while it was delusional. Well, Hume tells us that it's more plausible that we're delusional and lying to ourselves. Yes, Hume is talking, so you asked about the falsifiability, I provided you an answer for that. Hume is talking about the world in which we inhabit and I'm in agreement with Hume. That is separate from whether or not, if there is in fact a God, God should be able to overcome that limitation. If he can't, then he created in a flawed world that he cannot achieve what his goal is. If you do that, if God created a world, therefore he would therefore overachieve it. God didn't overachieve it, never got it. Not only would I reject the propositions, but it just doesn't logically follow that therefore the world is flawed. That's not a logical position to hold. The world we inhabit is flawed, we are imperfect thinkers, we have limited access to implement. That's not what I'm saying. We agree that there are flaws in the world, it doesn't mean that it's tied to some type of, well, God would otherwise have made it such and such. Not would have. Not would have, okay, so what you're arguing for is kind of like a computer programmer designing SIM people that he cannot instruct or interact with and then blaming them. Nowhere did I say cannot. Well, he has not. Don't agree that he has not. I think there are millions of Christians in the world over that would disagree with you that he hasn't. I know there are people who would disagree, but they don't ever present any evidence, they just present opinion. Right, but notice now that you're back to begging the question of that there is no evidence and when I say, okay, well what could count as evidence to falsify that, you have no falsification standard and I could say, I could present you the stars in the galaxy and you're gonna say, yeah, but in the abstract, that actually shouldn't cause me to believe. And I can say, okay, but God could, God could, by the interpestimony of the Holy Spirit and you say, yeah, but that'd be bad evidence, right? No, no, that's not what I said. That's what you said. I already acknowledged twice that direct revelation may well be sufficient to warrant belief, but absent that direct revelation, I have no way to assess it. But you've said, when I say it's, when I say you're saying it's bad evidence, it's because I'm not saying that it wouldn't be compelling by your own standard. It wouldn't rise to the level of what ought to compel someone because the person would have to then say, well, that gives me direct evidence of God. And you're gonna say, well, you need direct evidence of God to make that direct evidence to link. That evidence shouldn't, like the stars in the sky, you could be being deceived, you could be hallucinating. So that evidence on its own shouldn't lead you to belief reasonably. No, that's not what I'm saying. It's weird that you keep saying, I'm saying something that's not remotely what I'm saying. Okay, so if I have a testimony of the Holy Spirit to me, I have a God, right, you're gonna say that I then have sufficient warrant for my belief in God. No. Why? You just said that would be good evidence. No, you're not catching it. I said that a direct revelation might be sufficient to warrant belief. I don't have any way to investigate your claim of direct revelation. It may, in fact, be sufficient to warrant your belief. It does nothing for my belief. That's not what I asked you. I asked you if it then, if I had experience, if I had the interrupt, is that warrant for my belief? I don't know what I said is, I don't know what warrants your belief because I don't have that experience. I can't assess an experience I have not had. So when you said, you know, if you've had this revelation of the Holy Spirit, you suspect that I would say you shouldn't believe. And I wouldn't say that because I don't have a way to assess your experience. Unlike a lot of other people. I pretend to read minds on stage. I don't actually read minds. I know, that's not what I'm asking you. Again. I asked because you said, if that experience has happened, it may be sufficient evidence for warranted belief. I'm not asking if you would believe that I had that experience. I'm asking if I, in my person, have what I believe is a veridical experience of the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit. I'm not asking if you think it's true. I'm asking, would that then as a standard be sufficient evidence for me to face and have a warranted belief? I literally just answered this. And the answer is I don't know how to assess an experience I have not had. So I cannot say whether or not the experience you had is or is not sufficient to warrant belief because I haven't had that experience. That's what I said twice. Yeah, again, and I'm not asking you to verify if it's true or not. I didn't say anything about whether it was true. I said I haven't had that experience. So I cannot determine whether or not you are warranted. Right, but you're saying there's a standard. Let's call it the interior standard, such that if the conditions of the interior standard are met, that would be good evidence to warrant belief. But I have not had an ex... So what we're talking about here is a different standard. Basically, we have the standard of the world that we inhabit and then we have God and what God can do to overrule that. And if God can overrule that, then God may well be able to give you an experience that does provide sufficient warrant, but it is unique to you. It doesn't do anything for me and I have no way to assess that. It's not that God suddenly makes that God is providing you bad evidence. I'm not saying that. What God is doing would be providing you good evidence under a completely different standard that no one else can interact with or have any way to assess unless they've had that experience. Okay, I think... It's like, this is easy. If the other day, let's say I had amazing sex, because let's keep the channel fun. That's an experience that is mine. It's probably sufficient for me to conclude that yeah, that actually happened. It'll never be that for you, no matter how many times I relay it. And this is a relatively mundane claim because we're talking about the subjective experience of this. It's the same thing when we're talking about God giving a revelation to someone. It's not that it's bad evidence. It's that this is a completely different category of evidence and I have no way to assess this because I can't read your mind. I can't know how you're thinking. What I can do is look from the outside and say, you're sitting here saying that you don't think extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and I find that to be monumentally flawed aspect of any epistemology because what that means is that you can have an extraordinary claim and you would have lower standards of evidence for it than perhaps you should. You wanna dodge that by just saying all claims have whatever level of evidence is sufficient to justify them, which I agree with. But the thing is, we would both agree that I would hope that there are some claims like I got a dollar in my wallet versus I have a legitimate check for $10 billion in my wallet versus I have money from an alien world in my wallet. Those three claims have different, it's like, how do you prove them? There's different standards of evidence for it. You might not even demand any proof other than my word to the fact that I have a dollar. That seems reasonable because we know there are dollars. We know people have dollars. We know people keeping their wallets. When we get to something else that goes beyond that to I have alien currency from another world, merely showing you what I claim is alien currency, which is more than I would probably have to do for the dollar claim, still doesn't rise to the level of saying, yep, I can reasonably conclude that Matt has alien currency in his wallet. This is why I say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Yeah, which again, just no epistemologist says because they say claims require sufficient evidence. Extraordinary adds a certain subject of evaluative nature to it. That's why I get away from it because it just becomes subjective evaluation of what counts as extraordinary at that point. Is it really though? Because if we both agree, no, hey, all right, well, all right, go on then. Yeah, I mean, depending on what you're talking to, having a hundred dollars in your wallet might be extraordinary. So the... Well, so no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. There is a subjective aspect to this that one person might find extraordinary is different from another person might find extraordinary. But in much the same way that we have a fair market value for things, if I tell you I'm selling my 73 pento for $487,000, virtually any reasonable person would find that to be extraordinary. And if I'm selling it to aliens for their currency, virtually any reasonable person would find that extraordinary. It's not enough to just say we need, matter of fact, it tells us nothing to say, oh, every claim should have sufficient evidence. I agree, that's a big nothing burger. But doesn't in any way mean that just because different people might value different claims at different levels of extraordinaryness, doesn't change the fact that they are in fact, more or less mundane. Which sufficiency covers, I mean, that just is the philosophical term for, I mean, extraordinary is just as much of a nothing burger because what is extraordinary is, well, you have a sliding scale that can go, the sufficiency is the same kind of scale, one's a nothing burger, the other one's a nothing burger. But extraordinary at least adds something about what would be sufficient. Sufficiency adds what would be sufficient. No, it doesn't, that's a tautology, sufficiency is sufficient. And extraordinary is what's extraordinary. But we can define that, you don't think we can sit here and say, hey, this claim is mundane and this one is much more extraordinary? You don't think we can define sufficiency? No. I mean, I would just, at that point, I would just push you to go read some philosophers in epistemology. I mean, we have very clear ways of defining sufficiency. I'd push you to stop and think for a little bit. Yeah. Because saying sufficiency is sufficiency is sufficient is a tautology of a tautology. Well, that's not actually how I was defining it, but I still want to go back one last time because I still don't think we're there. Oh, I know we're not there. Because I'm not asking. Again, I'm just gonna keep going back because I'm not asking what would convince you that I have warrant, right? Warrant is, if I have warrant, then I have warrant. Whether or not I can demonstrate it to you, I'm not asking you if you have warrant to believe that I have warrant. I agree. Yeah. So if your standard that you've set up is true, you've set up this, it actually ends up, it's this weird actually double-edged sword now where I might be able to say, well, internal witness of the Holy Spirit is sufficient to warrant religious belief. And I simply can't demonstrate it to you. Correct. To your self-suffction. Right, so, but then the argument is, because remember the question is, is there good evidence for the existence of God? And I'm gonna say, yeah, billions of people have sufficient evidence for it. They have warrant. Whether or not you have warrant to believe that's true, you're, no, you're actually becomes irrelevant. Okay, fine. Then it's irrelevant. But say, see, I can't show whether or not you have warrant. At most I can concede that you may have warrant, but saying billions of people have warrant, therefore it's reasonable, is not an argument. I'm not actually making it as an argument. I'm saying that this is an artifact of the standard that you're pushing here, right? Because not only is it non-falsifiable, you've now pushed the warranting of it wholly into the subjective realm. No, no, this is the thing. This only is in the end of the subjective realm with this special kind of warrant that you're asserting needs to exist because there's a God. I don't think there's a God and I don't think that this is, and tell such time as I, I'm willing to accept anything if somebody, including a God, can demonstrate it and God should be able to demonstrate it. If God has demonstrated it to you, congratulations, but that does nobody else any good. This might be a good time to end it. We have five seconds left of that 60 minute range there. If you guys are okay with going to Q and A. I hate Tyler, I know you've got another round in the chamber ready to fire. No, it's fine. It's fine. I think we've gotten to the point where we are. Yeah, we'll keep talking in circles probably. It's better, good questions because then maybe we'll get somewhere. Somebody in the questions has probably figured out what the narrow point of contention is. Ozzie or somebody will chime in and say, oh, what you should have said was this and then that solves everything. Who knows, we'll go for it. So let's see. Jumping over there. I wanna let everybody know if you do have a question, feel free to fire it into the live chat. We will try to get through as many as we possibly can. We've got 40 minutes that I'm setting the clock for right now and so we can't guarantee that we'll get to every one, including some, just to respect the time of the debaters, we might not even get to every super chat and so I'm really sorry about that. We'll try our very best by moving fast. So thanks again, folks. And first one up, Steven Steen. Thanks for your super chat. And let's see. So, oh, they're kind of in reverse in the table. Give me one second. I'm gonna start from the bottom then just to make sure I've got this in order. Okay, good to have you back. James from Andrew Handelsman. Thanks so much. It's great to be back. We're excited. Elijah Barr Sobok. Thanks for your question. They said, God has revealed to me in a way I can be certain that it is reasonable to believe that the sun stood still in the Bible but unreasonable to believe the moon split in half in the Quran. I'm not sure if this is meant to be what their point was. So let's see, we'll go to the next one. Thank you, luminiferous Ethan. Thanks for your super chat. They asked question for Tyler. The scientific methodology can be used to investigate unrelated propositions. What is an example of a different quote, non-natural unquote truth that can be reached with your methodology separate from the existence of a deity? Transcendental facts via abduction. Right, I mean, potentially if Matt was able to or any other, you know, if he was able to, Nagel could, they could potentially give abductive explanations for these transcendental facts. Right, I mean, this is just, that's just saying, look, if science can do this, then what possible standard could there be other than science? I mean, that's just the failure of scientism to understand, well, we have deduction, induction, we have abduction, there are philosophical proofs for things, there's grammatical proofs for things. There are all kinds of other ways that we can know things besides the scientific method. There are simply other ways that we know things. Gotcha, thanks so much. Michael Tizinski, thanks for your question. This is an interesting one. This is for Matt. They asked, what things about the Bible does Matt really appreciate? That's kind of hard. I mean, there's certainly some good stuff in Ecclesiastes, there's some good stuff I would argue even in the Gospels. I went through into the deconstruction of like the Sermon on the Mount pointing out what things I thought were good and what things I thought were terrible. You know, from my new perspective, probably the things I like most about it is that the Bible kind of read and understood is one of the best arguments to not be a Christian or a Jew that I could come up with if you in fact care about human beings and goodness and reason and stuff like that. But you know, there are good things in there. It's just, I don't find that anything that's in there that's good and true is contingent upon the truth of Christianity or anything. You can get it elsewhere. Gotcha, thanks so much. Next up, Matt Thaggad. They say, Matt is my hero point. You're awesome. You got a fan out there, Matt. Let's see. Okay, so in that case, your hero is telling you to stop having heroes because you're just gonna wind up disappointed. I'm fallible and yeah, I appreciate being appreciated. Don't get me wrong, but I don't need hero worshippers, fan. Next up, J.L. Warren. Let's see, they say, this is fitting. They said, this one fits in there. They say, I pray to understand logical fallacies better and be more cogent in my arguments. Thank you, Matt, for answering my prayer. So, God works. That actually ties into something. We're doing kind of a prayer answering thing on the atheist experience where people can send in postcards and I will answer their prayers. And so there's a bit of a side joke going on with that now. Oh, I get it. You've got it. Cody Davis, thanks for your question. They asked, why would God give free will but punish people who use their free will by not believing? And doesn't eternal damnation taint your free will? I think they maybe mean like a threat of eternal damnation. Oddly, I'd almost bet money that Tyler and I would agree on a portion of this. And then, if you don't give somebody free will, how could you ever punish them? I mean, that's kind of absurd. Well, so what we might agree on is, I think I remember in your debate with Braxton Hunter that you're a compatibilist. Largely, so depending on the definition of free will, I don't think we have free will in the libertarian sense. Yeah, neither do I. So I mean, you're going to be a naturalistic compatibilist. I'm going to be a theistic compatibilist. You're a Calvinist? Yeah. So but both of us are going to say, well, that there's compatibilistic freedom. I simply have no problem with there being determining factors and freedom for us to do what we choose to do, what we desire to do most. Can I? Gotcha. I think Matt's has a follow up. He's breaking up. Yeah, I was breaking up. Sorry, hope it's. Do you have a follow up? No, I'll talk to Tyler later. Go ahead. You got it. Let's see here. Subtracted, thanks for your super chat. They said, hey, Tyler, if God doesn't exist, the laws of logic would still be applicable to reality. I mean, OK, I gave multiple reasons why I don't think that that's the case, multiple arguments and they would have to, you know, at that point I can pull a proposition from Matt and saying, you know, given the abductive evidence and arguments that I think warrant my belief that God is necessary for those to be true, I would need some type of defeater for that. And a simple assertion just won't do it. Gotcha. Just some guy, thanks for your super chat. Ask, Tyler said there can't be direct scientific evidence for God, but then ask for direct evidence for God. Or against God, probably. That must be it. Well, and maybe to clear up the confusion is that and I don't know if it'll help if I clarify the point is simply the difference between direct and indirect evidence where direct evidence would be, you know, God in the petrogis, which is just to say a supernatural natural fact, which isn't, you know, it's like saying, can God create a square circle or maybe a bachelor and I'm gonna say, no, we can't do that. But can God create indirect evidence, the kinds of scientific evidence that some theistic philosophers feed into like a fine-tuning argument or something like that, that that's entirely possible. But the other side of what I was doing was an internal critique of Matt's view and saying, well, if you're saying that your standard is this type of empirical evidence, then what would you accept as those? So I'm not affirming both of those. I'm one I'm actually arguing for and the other one I'm doing an internal critique. Gotcha, thanks so much. Next up, Johnny V says, Matt, you're looking pretty good these days. Congrats on becoming more sveltey. I hope I'm saying that word right. That's interesting. They say, what do you bench, bro? You're getting mad props, Matt. Next up, so sorry to put you on the spot. Actually, if I can get Matt a compliment, you are, you know, I've watched you over the years. You are looking, you're looking good, man. I couldn't tell you how much I bench, because I don't bench. But yeah, at my heaviest, I was probably right at 270 and I'm right around 185 now. Yeah, that's good for you. Unless I'm dying, in which case, it's not that good for me, but... Well, let's hope not, but hopefully it's healthy good for you. Feels pretty good so far. Yeah, sveltey. I've never said a new word for me. All right, Virillian, but yes, absolutely positive. I like that. And then Q for Tyler, they ask, if Matt says that he saw the stars spell out the sentence and you can't see the sentence, would you classify that as good evidence? This is where I would actually fall back on something like Matt was saying, and I'd say, well, Matt might have warrant for, might have sufficient warrant for him to believe that. There's a difference between, you know, warranting for myself and demonstrating it to the satisfaction of somebody else. Yeah, but if there's a God and that God wants to firm up that warrant, having both of us see it, achieves that. Yeah, but that, well, I'm not sure how much crosstalk we wanna get. I would just simply say that I think there is plenty of evidence and sufficient warrant available to all. I simply disagree with the assumption of the hidden God argument, so. Gotcha. Thanks. It'd be nice if you'd show up in one of these debates then. Next up, Scott Lott, thanks for your super chat. Didn't see a message. If you meant to attach one, let's see, I think actually I did see it here. So we'll ask that one question for both. If you could send a back 2,000 years, what would it be? I'm trying to figure out what they meant in terms of if you could send. Maybe if you could send something back 2,000 years? I don't know, a message. Oh, well maybe a message would be it, maybe. That is my guess. Let's go with that. And correct me if I'm wrong in the live chat, Scott. I'll keep an eye out. I'm not sure how to. I don't remember the dates, but I don't know. I would probably opt for some scientific fact or truth that we discovered relatively recently to see if we can't move us forward. But maybe they wouldn't understand it. That's a really, I'd wash your hands. I don't know. Now the question was instead of sending a message, if like I could go back in time, I would go, you know, like if I had the time machine and in time travel were possible, I've always kind of held that one of the first things I would do is go back to, you know, just before the crucifixion of Jesus to observe. Did he exist? Did it happen? You know, was there, you know, signs? Did the dead rise up and march on Jerusalem? You know, hang around and see what happens over those days. What monitor the tomb, that sort of thing. But that would all just be, you know, for my personal curiosity, because if I come back and say I built a time machine and I went back and I saw this and whether I say it all happened exactly as reported or it's all lies, there's no reason for anybody to believe. Gotcha. Really interesting from both of you. Thank you very much. And stupid whore energy as she likes to call herself. Thanks for your super chat. She said, warrant is personal, not subjective. I think I kind of like that. I mean, you can be wrong. Like we can all be wrong about whether or not we are warranted, but it's still a decision that, I mean, it's not even, it's not even something we have that much choice over. You are either convinced or you are not and you're always gonna think that you're convinced for good reasons because if you thought they were bad, you wouldn't be convinced. And so, yeah, we can be wrong. Yeah, depending on how she hashes it out, I mean, you might wanna argue that the, I don't know, because depending on whether I'm doing, trying to understand it from a naturalistic perspective or not, I mean, the experience itself might be objective, but what is compelling to you is still gonna be whether or not it causes you to believe that it's still gonna be a subjective experience. So I'm not sure I like it. I think I get where it's going. It's pithy, but I don't think, I don't know if I'd say it that way. Gotcha, you got it. Let's see he, Lumen, let me go back to a question. Lumeniferous Ethan, thanks for your clarification on your question. They said, so there was a question for Tyler and they said, the scientific method can be used to investigate unrelated propositions. What is an example of a different, quote unquote, non-natural truth that can be reached with your methodology separate from the existence of a deity? And so they stressed that they had said that the scientific method can be used to investigate unrelated propositions. If that, if you understand the... I'm not sure what they're asking. I mean, I don't hold to some, you know, I'm not a polytheist, I don't hold all kinds of naturalistic or supernatural non-natural things. So, you know, we might use other explanations to understand because a lot of the transcendental things are going to be non-natural things. You know, when we talk about something like the identity over time, that might have, you know, natural iterations and outworking, but the principle itself is a non-natural fact. So, and I'm not sure we use the scientific method to directly evidence that proposition in any meaningful way. So I mean, I would just again fall back to what we have all kinds of different deductive, inductive, abductive, mathematical ways to prove all kinds of non-natural facts. And as Matt has pointed out, you know, I think incorrectly because I think these things exist in the mind of God. I think that actually is the coherent framework with what they mean, but let's say for the sake of argument, you know, I even give Matt a bit of a doubt. If no natural universe exists, he's still going to say, well, these truths are still true truths. And so that would, you know, nothing natural exists. So that seems to entail that they just would de facto be. Well, I wouldn't argue that they were. It's just that in that thought experiment, looking at that, they would still be true. If that were the actual state of affairs, there would be nothing true. There would be nothing, because there's nothing, doesn't have properties. And by the way, you know, we just a nitpick of mine because on several occasions, I've heard the scientific method. There are many scientific methods. And even when you're talking about like grammatical and mathematic proofs of things, I think those count as scientific methods. The process of using reason to evaluate evidence and reach a conclusion all fits under the scientific methods where we have this issue is on warrant, because like when you say, you know, oh, there's a bunch of Christians who are convinced that they have warrant and have been provided enough evidence, I could just as easily say there are a bunch of people who believe they have sufficient evidentiary warrant to believe that they've encountered ghosts, but that doesn't mean that they have, and it doesn't mean that anybody that they're correct, and it doesn't mean that anybody else has a warrant to believe they've encountered ghosts. Gotcha, thanks so much. And let's see, we have another one. This is from dragnocksilvis. Thanks for your question. Question for Tyler, if God didn't exist, do you think that the principle of non-contradiction and other logical principles would not hold true? So that's an interesting question because it's like asking me, as an end, if it's attempted to be an internal critique of my view, that's like asking me if swivel swurps were swivel swoops. It's like, it's a meaningless question, right? Because I think that God is the necessary precondition for rationality. So it's saying, if the precondition didn't exist, do you think that therefore the conditions would have these other attributes? And I'm gonna say, well, if the precondition for those didn't exist, then they wouldn't exist. So that the question just becomes meaningless at that point. It presupposes the possibility that anything could exist absent God when Tyler's in this position that God is the necessary grounding for everything. And so if God didn't exist, there would be nothing there. It's just, I get why he thinks it's nonsensical. The problem is, is that it puts us in a position where I can look at the world and both look at it without appealing to any God, but compare different God models. And Tyler, by virtue of this conclusion, and I'm gonna say, there's no real easy way to phrase this. It's not like you have a more difficult time of it. When it comes to your view, the rest is just impossible. It's not possible that there's not a God. It's not possible that it's not the God that you believe in. It's not possible that the universe occurred through natural processes, none of that's possible. You got it. Thanks so much. And next up, we do have a question from Ryan Trust. They asked, Tyler, please quickly summarize your evidence other than a bunch of people have had personal revelation. Well, I mean, at that point, I would just push them back to listen to the opening statement because that actually wasn't my argument, right? What that was, that's not evidence that I would normally present, right? I'm saying that that seems to be an implication of the standard that Matt is giving. So I think the questioner is thinking that I was actually giving that as if that was good evidence. And I'm just gonna say, well, that, I mean, I think the questioner was misunderstanding the difference between affirmation and an internal critique. Gotcha. Thanks so much. Next up, just some guy, thanks for your super chat. They say, Tyler says there can only be indirect evidence for God, yet believe that God came down in human form and talked to people. Is that not direct? No, that would still actually be indirect, right? So a direct evidence for something would be, because if we're gonna say, the God of classical theism is a transcendental, is a transcendent immaterial, spiritual entity, the direct evidence would be of, you know, the incarnate Jesus Christ, right? That would be indirect evidence for the nature of God, right? That'd be a direct evidence of the manifestation, which would be indirect of the nature of God himself, right? So those are two different things. The direct would be, the direct within that model would be a Damascus road experience or the direct revelation from the Holy Spirit. Gotcha, thanks so much. And Justin T, thanks for your super chat. They said, what do you each believe was your opponent's strongest point in this debate? Well, for me, the argument that was presented, skipping the abductive stuff, which I think is automatically weaker and even definitionally weaker. The argument was if God doesn't exist, then there are no transcendent, we can confirm transcendent facts, we can confirm transcendent facts, therefore God exists. And so the argument itself begins with a premise with an assertion that he made an attempt to defend. It's just that the defense for me fell short because it immediately appealed to these are transcendent facts and therefore they must occupy some metal level or transcendent realm. And I get that he wasn't referring to a physical realm. I think the strongest thing is that it is appealing to people because it is incredibly frustrating to think that reason, the thing that we rely on the most may not have some confirmable grounding. And while I understand that that's troublesome for many people, it doesn't change whether or not reason is reliable. Just like it'd be nice that if I understood how my car engine worked enough that I could know when it was beginning to fail, but the test of it is whether or not it's actually running right now. Gotcha, thanks so much. Yeah, and you know, thanks for the backhand accompaniment. Mine would actually be somewhat similar. I don't think that actually we saw any strong arguments. I think what we saw were things that would be compelling to the skeptical camp, which is going to be a virtue with it a debate if you can be compelling to a certain group of people where it makes the appearance that something like this vague skepticism is a reasonable rejoinder to things. And I just, it's just not. It's a statement of a personal disposition about something. It's not actually a rejoinder of something to say, well, you know, I'm in the face of arguments and evidence for something to say, well, there could be some other explanation. So therefore we shouldn't affirm the way, I mean, that just type of vague explanation. Again, it sounds reasonable to the skeptic, but it's just, it's not a valid defeater. Maybe at some point we should debate skepticism because I'm not convinced that you really understand what I mean by skepticism. Because I can't think of, I mean, if it's a method that has the goal of being as, have an internal model of reality that's as accurate as possible, it's all about finding whatever methods reliably lead to what is identifiably the truth. It's not about, it's not cynicism. It's not about eliminating things. It is saying, hey, these methods of investigating and exploring the world consistently produce reliable results. And these other ones don't, like, you know, making appeals to faith. There's nothing I can't justify by appealing to faith. Not that you did. There's nothing I can't justify by appealing to brute fact either, but you did. So. Yeah, the problem is that, the problem is that brute facts are facts. It's not, to say that they're potentially brute facts is actually, I mean, I could claim anything as a brute fact and how would you get around the basically faith commitment that something is potentially a brute fact. There's, it's just an assertion without any type of basis to avoid. Oh, facts are demonstrable. That's the point. But their bruteness is not. Well, maybe we're in disagreement or confusion about what's meant by bruteness, but I'm pointing out that faith is unreliable and your response is that brute facts are unreliable. And I'm just like, I'm talking about things that are demonstrable. You know, like, hey, I'm holding up a cell phone, fact. There's 25 million ways we can demonstrate that fact. You would be undermining all of experience and reason and exploration and you would be doing it on the internet that was created through this process of facts. And this goes back to the dog throwing the tennis ball. You're back to pointing to the tennis ball and I'm saying, great. We both agree you're holding up the cell phone. Right, because we both have the transcendental of the realness of the actual world. And then we go back into the grounding of these transcendental facts. Right, so I keep trying to point these, but this is a tennis ball and I say, okay, great. So honestly, if there's time, I'm happy for you to do it. You've mentioned this tennis ball example two, three times. I have no idea what the heck you're talking about. I don't know what your tennis ball, what is the question you're trying to assess? You're like, oh, you're the guy that threw the tennis ball at the dog. What is the point of this? I don't understand it. Because you keep, when we're talking about the transcendental fact, right, transcendental facts point beyond themselves to explanations, right? And you're, and I developed that argument and you keep saying, yeah, but the transcendental facts work and I say, great. I agree the transcendental facts work, but they point to an explanation in the grounding. You say, yeah, but the transcendental facts work. And I say, I agree. I agree with the whole of the actual world. I agree with the reality of real past. I agree with identity over time. I agree. We basically agree on these transcendental facts. What is, I don't understand the tennis ball. The transcendental facts are the tennis ball, right? I'm asking the meta question about those transcendental facts. I'm trying to get to the aboutness of them. You keep going to the facts themselves. And I keep saying, great, I agree with the facts themselves. I'm asking the meta question about the facts. What is the question the dog has about the tennis ball? I'm not sure how else to explain it, right? Because it's literally, what is the question that's not being answered? It's not a question. It's an analogy, right? The transcendental facts are the tennis ball. We agree the tennis ball is there. And when I keep asking about, and I keep asking the meta question about it, you just keep going back to pointing to the transcendental facts. So your analogy is I threw a tennis ball at the dog, and I agree it's a tennis ball. And the dog wants to know where the tennis ball came from? No, the tennis ball was, I'm asking why the tennis ball was thrown. How is it thrown? Who threw it? And you're saying, yeah, but it's a tennis ball. No, no, I'm not saying it's a tennis ball. This is why I've misunderstood this analogy all night. I threw a tennis ball. That's demonstrable. That's not, that's not what I was saying. We can move on. Okay. I don't think we're in yet. I threw the tennis ball because I wanted to. If you want a deeper explanation from that, I don't know why I decided to throw the tennis ball. I'm not asking you about freedom for why you threw the tennis ball. Well, that's kind of, all right. That's all right. Then I don't know what we're talking about. That's all right. We do have a chance if you guys want to kind of dig in deeper on this, but it might also be, your answer might be another issue. The person asking the question also asked, what did you think was your opponent's weakest point tonight? I think we'd both say everything else. Okay. I'll go with that. Gotcha. Thanks. Appreciate that. Next up, we had, let's see. Arise Hampton, thanks so much for your super chat. Asking what must someone do to be saved? My guess is that it's for you, Tyler, and we'll give Matt a chance whether he wants to challenge or critique. I have no idea. Gotcha. I don't know what there is to be saved from or to or how or anything else, but here's Tyler's chance to preach the gospel. Yeah. I would just say that what one must do to be saved is to repent and believe, to recognize that they are creation in God's good creation and that we are broken and fallen and in need of grace. And we repent of that and we look to the one who is the author and the foundation of all. Gotcha. And if you'd like to change, if you want to, Matt, you can give a critique. Otherwise, we can go to another. Yeah, let's keep going. You got it. Joshua Dugal, thanks for your super chat. He said, question for both. If you could rewrite the Bible, what would you change? Almost everything, not quite everything, but almost. This is like somebody putting one up on a tee for me to point out my favorite thing that I ever said on this subject. So I tried to demonstrate that I could write a better book than the Bible and that I could prove it to a bunch of church of Christ preachers by saying I could rewrite the Bible word for word, reverse its position on slavery and it would be a better book. There's other things in there that I would change as well. But the fact that I could rewrite it word for word, reverse its position on slavery would make it clearly a better book. Anybody who suggested it wouldn't be a better book by changing that. I mean, they've sacrificed their humanity for the sake of some ideology. So it wouldn't be the only thing I'd change, but that seems to be the easiest example. Yeah, and again, I wouldn't change anything. I fundamentally disagree, probably with Matt's reading and understanding of those passages. So also a debate probably for a different time. Yeah, especially since it's incredibly straightforward to buy your slaves from the heathen that surround you and that you can beat them as long as they don't die within a couple of days. Clearly not with the passage set, but again, for a different topic. Exodus 21. Maybe another day if you guys want. We can have you guys come on, but it'd be nice if you just read it word for word. I won't even have to show up. Just read it word for word. Again, this shows the fundamentalist background of the common online atheist that it's this hyper perspicuity of, I read it just the Bible and me alone, word for word as it is, with no contextual interpretation whatsoever. Oh, and this is the absolutely pitiful excuse of contextualism to try to excuse barbarism. I read the passage word for word. That's the question of barbarism. If this is something that's inspired by a God, the one and only thing you should say is human beings shall not be owned as property. They are not your property. They're not your money. You don't get to beat them as long as they don't die with them. That's an embarrassing. Not what the text is about. It happens to talk about context. What's the context that makes it okay to own people and beat them? The text doesn't actually say it's okay to beat them. It does. It doesn't. But again, for another time, I'll be happy to send you the lectures I've done on the exegetical and the original treatment of the original languages that I've sent you. John Robertson, thanks for your question. I didn't hear it. Was it, do you say question or? I just wondered if he had a preferred version. Oh, okay. Like NIV, RSV, KJV. Oh, NASB is usually the version I use or we can go to the Hebrew if you'd like. Yeah. John. But again, probably a topic for a different day. John Robertson, thanks for your question. They said, Tyler, what could change your mind about God? Yeah, so this was actually interesting. I continued to push Matt for false abiability. Remember, that's a big feature for scientific reasonableness. And there was nothing that would falsify it, except for vagueness. I know very clearly what would falsify my view. If Matt could give a possible explanation for any of the transcendental features that I give that did not end in absolute ad hoc arbitrary nonsense like neoplatonic groundwater or naturalism would, that would actually go a very far away. Specifically for me, and this one is actually, I didn't bring it up in the argument, but actually when I was an atheist, one of the arguments that brought me out of naturalism specifically was the moral argument, because my condition was that I had a naturalism and my conviction that something like raping a small child for fun and profit is wrong was far more than my conviction that God did not exist. And I continue to find that the only way to ground that as an objective moral standard that is obligatory to all people was just simply not possible to be grounded on naturalism. So if that's something that can be shown to have a naturalistic foundation that doesn't, again, end in arbitrariness or subjectivity or nihilism, that would be something that would go a long way. And then something, again, that would nullify the internal witness of the Holy Spirit. Go back and listen, because when I was asked about falsification, I actually answered it despite the fact that he keeps claiming that I didn't and we're also talking about different categories, but his answer of what would change his mind or what would falsify his position, doesn't make it falsifiable because if you step through and actually figure out what he's asking for, he's saying, my position is falsifiable when you prove there's some other grounding for logic than God. No, and you prove that there's something more plausible. It can be, it can be. I haven't demonstrated that yours is possible or plausible or that a grounding or foundation is even necessary. So you've set up a situation where the thing that will falsify your belief is falsifying your belief, which makes it circular. Congratulations. So it's wrong to say that, okay, keep going. Next up, appreciate your question from Goku Sun. Thanks for your question who asked, why can't God show himself like he did in the Old Testament? Because he didn't then either. Yeah, because he did. I mean, we can all beg the question and I would simply say that the question phrase is a can't. I have no problem saying that God can. The question is whether he continues to do so or not. Gotcha. Thanks so much. Just another atheist asks, Tyler, in your example for Matt, in your example for Matt, about God quote unquote, rearranging the stars, you used a lot of quote unquote, could haves. And if God could do anything, why doesn't he do it? I have no idea. I mean, this is where Matt doesn't wanna claim arrogance to say what would falsify. I'm not gonna claim arrogance to say why God doesn't do certain things. I have no idea. Gotcha. By their fruits, ministries, thanks for your super chat. I didn't see a question attached. If you want to attach one, let me know. Shoot me a, tag me in the live chat. Connor D, thanks for your question asked. They said, I think the analogy was akin to Tyler asking why cheese tastes good. Tyler felt Matt was simply saying, it's cheese. In response to the question, I think this goes back to the tennis ball on the dog. Tennis ball, yeah. Maybe, but why cheese tastes good, first of all, it doesn't taste good to everybody. There are, and it doesn't necessarily smell good, but we can go through how taste works and how the olfactory senses play into it. And people in Japan think that our cheese smells like nasty old socks. And I suppose it kind of does. But I don't... Gotcha. Let's see. I appreciate your super chat from SGT Cully. They asked, Tyler, if God is all maximally powerful and all knowing, why hasn't he revealed himself to me in an obvious and convincing way? Yeah, so this again goes kind of towards Matt's question. I would simply say that the question has a certain assumption in there that he hasn't. The only thing that's true of that is that it hasn't been convincing to you. I simply reject the hidden God position that God has hidden. I think that God has revealed himself in the person of work of Jesus Christ in the resurrection. And I think he's revealed himself in special revelation. I think he's revealed himself in imagining his power in all of creation and the moral law within and all of the transcendental facts. I think that there is literally a cosmos of evidence that ought to lead any reasonable person to belief in God. Whether or not it is compelling to you personally, that just goes into the subjective claim about what you are personally incredulous or convinced by. And that's your personal psychology, I don't know. I find it really weird that just a minute ago you were asked essentially the same question in a different forum, which is why doesn't God reveal himself to everybody and you decided to go with I Don't Know? No, his question specifically was why doesn't God directly reveal himself to every individual person? And this one was, why doesn't God directly reveal himself to me? So it's a subject of that. So you don't know why God doesn't reveal himself to everybody, but you think that God has revealed himself to everybody. Sorry, the way that I was taking the original, the first question was, why doesn't God give everyone a Damascus road experience? This question I was taking as more of the hidden God question, which I simply reject because I don't think God is a hidden God. So one of the questions is, and I genuinely don't know what your answer is on this, does God want everyone to know he exists? I think that, yes, but I'm not convinced that, I mean, I'm a Calvinist, I don't think that God is predestined to be saved. That's gonna be a whole different theological. But if God wanted everyone to know he exists, then clearly Damascus road for everyone would achieve that goal. Well, it's interesting because I mean, we have biblical passages where God specifically like in Matthew and Mark, relying on Isaiah, where it actually specifically says that Jesus spoke in parables so that they wouldn't believe. I'm aware of that. Would you? I have no problem. The answer is that you believe God wants everybody to know. No. I'm wondering how you can believe that God wants everybody to know when the one thing that would achieve that hasn't been done. Yeah. I think God has, everyone has the obligation to know. I simply have no problem holding the biblical position that God, I don't think God is actively trying to make himself directly known in the saving way to every single person. Well, I agree with that because I don't think he's actively trying to make anybody know. That's because you don't believe he exists. That only exists. But I'm saying that if you have the position, I believe that God wants everybody to know. And here is a mechanism by which everybody can know. And it has not happened. Then it would seem that your belief that God wants everybody to know is flawed. Only if your understanding is that my belief, I wasn't saying that God wants everyone to know. In that, I'm not trying to say that God wants everybody to know and have a conviction that it's true. What I said is that God wants everyone to have the obligation to know. God has revealed himself through all of creation, I believe. That's not the same thing as saying God is going once everyone to know in a sense that he is going to compel belief in every single person. Gotcha. Just to try to move through as many questions, we've got these last few, everything we get through these maybe in time. Two guys talking boxing. Thanks for your question. They said, if God knows the future, how could he screw up the prime directive so badly? I'm not sure what prime directive means. Did that come out? I think it's a Star Trek reference and that's fiction. Gotcha. Maybe it's a playful one. Okay. Pansell, Jonas, thanks for your super chat. They said, Matt, why not run for office to establish the first secular human society and save us from American society, which is the most prosperous in history. So I think they're being sassy when they say, I think they're basically saying, America is prosperous, it's religious, and Matt, I think they're saying, what do you have to say about that? I think if I've interpreted it right, I can read it again. I'm not sure that prosperousness is the criteria by which I would judge a society to be superior. Why won't I run for office? Because I'm probably not qualified to hold office, although I'm more qualified than some of the people who are in there. It's just that they don't seem to recognize it. And I'm probably unelectable. I'm doing what I do because this is where I can probably do the most good. But if you're only worried about your pocketbook, congrats, I'm worried about more. Gotcha. Thanks so much. And last question of the night. Thanks so much, folks. Key Morgan, appreciate your question. They asked, if God created the universe, why are there billions of planets that are not viable for life? Isn't that more evidence for humans being a quote unquote accident? Yeah, no, I mean, I don't, that's probably directed to me. I don't think so. I mean, this is a lot of work that's done with cosmologists and things like that. And the, sorry, I'm somewhat losing my voice so I'm getting quieter. There's a lot of work done that is in order for the universe to be life permitting at all anywhere to have the features of a life permitting universe. It needs to be the size that it is. It needs to have the expansion rate that it is, right? It needs to have all, it needs to have these features such that these artifacts, such as uninhabitable planets and stuff like that, are not direct evidence about humanity being an accident or anything like that. Simply because they may simply be artifacts of a rapidly expanding universe of the size that it is. And actually, it just shows that an all-powerful God still has to make things look like it occurred naturally without any intervention and has whatever limits there are. Couldn't have created life where there was just people on a planet, know nothing else around, not possible. We have to make it look as big and complex and naturally occurring as possible. Limitations on God. Or it doesn't follow that it's couldn't. It's simply that God, as an artifact of the universe. Now you're going to argue that it couldn't? I didn't argue that he couldn't. He did. You talked about this is what has to happen. It's an artifact. As a feature of this specific cosmos, it's not a constraint on God's nature. So that once God created a different cosmos, he could have created a different cosmos. Why did he create the one that makes it looks like he had nothing to do with it? Why not create one where it was obvious? I simply disagree. Again, I gave arguments why it looks exactly why, based on the transcendental features and all these, that looks exactly like it was created. So we simply disagree on the inference from what we observe. We will take off, but we want to say first, thanks so much everybody just for being here. It's been a true pleasure. Thanks for all your questions. And we really want to say thanks so much to Matt and Tyler for being here. It's been a true joy. This is honestly, well, first of all, we've never had 1400 people in the live chat at once. This was huge. People were loving it. And the feedback was really positive. People have been amped about this. And also, yeah, just want to remind you folks, both of these gentlemen's links, I have put in the description box. So just down there, you can click on those links if you've enjoyed what you've heard today and want to hear more. So with that, want to say thanks for being here folks. Keep sifting out the reasonable from the unreasonable. And one last thanks to Matt and Tyler for being here.